Knight of Swords
The knight fights for king and country. For god maybe. And yet a myth sustains him, an old story true from time to time and why not for him: that he might, like kings of old, fight his way through vainglorious triumph to sit squarely on the throne. That is, we should see the knight as caught up in the struggle required to seize the kingdom. No ruling here, except for ourselves. And for the court of Swords this means to be become the master of the thinking mind, a paradigm of intellect and ethics, of analysis and rational justice. One who can cut through the bull to the truth. To win this long war is to become the wise consultant who might solve any problem, the more technical the better.
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There were a million dragons in my youth—the nearest at hand in the shape of a vaulted cathedral, its craning neck a steeple, its scant plumage stained glass saints. We were Roman Catholics, with every weekend a dirgeful ritual and each holiday an obligation. Well, I thought I was too smart for all that God-bothering. I trusted the microscope and the caliper, the brute force analysis, the sharp end of mathematics. I couldn’t believe a thinking mind would be deceived by simple incense and oratory, by tradition and hymn. I thought my blade, a dragonslayer now, was sharp as the hyaline edge of obsidian.
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Knights are the teenagers of the court. Energetic and idealistic, willing to sacrifice because they don’t know what they’re putting on the line. And so they can be stunningly brave, for sure, and reckless. They can hold the principle they’ve learned with an unbreakable grip, and they can bludgeon the world with the letter of the law—understanding nothing of its spirit. It’s a card about running the meridian between a virtue and its dark twin: direct to one side and tactless to the other, incisive versus derogatory, knowledgeable versus knowing-it-all, authoritative or authoritarian. This balance has to be learned one way or another. . .the way children come to understand through rough and tumble play and falling out of trees. The way one becomes a master of a thing by being painfully inept at it for a long, long time.
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The collective thought is spangled and dripping with theories on how life originated: trickster gods and immaculate sculptors and lightning strikes on fetid pond scum. None of it is satisfactory to a cutting mind. For a scientist, the irreducible granule of life is that which replicates itself. A man named Graham Cairns-Smith posited, in the 1960s, a starting point, a dim echo, of the self-doubling pattern that makes us alive. He said that, before DNA could weave and unweave and copy itself, the magic of re-creation played out in the humble dirt. Clay crystals—of course, not at all what Jehovah rolled into Adam—may have propagated their defects and perfections, may have been shaped and selected for by the peculiarities of water and sun and gravity. Crystals grow, they do, they self-assemble, they pass along their imprint to their sons and daughters, look it up. They alter as well, they shift and reform and adapt. Cairns-Smith said these clay crystals gathered—over some eon eons ago—the nucleotides and proteins that are the wires and transistors of the robot that is us. And then this biological material, aggregated and recapitulated, eventually left behind the clay, the organism left behind the dirt. And yet without this dim-witted bridge, not a thought in its head. . .well, then you have nothing that can breathe or think.
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It took a long time to realize that my next dragon was rationality. I’d let it swallow me whole, assuming I’d be warm and safe inside. And yet, how cramped my quarters were, how little I could see. But I let that dragon fight for me, scorching all the dark goblins of the land, the petty thieves. There are plenty of those, of course. And yet it’s a countryside not only beset by delusions but graced by mystics and clairvoyants, poets and seers. They too were burned and I became no wiser.
This is not the card that tells you how the switch was made. How one climbs out and turns this dragon into a pet—pull an ear for the flames, pull the other to take flight. But it came to be my servant, Reason did, even if I cannot always tell it what to do. It’d be far less powerful if I could. And I can see now, as I look back across the wasteland—the scorched earth and the oases we found in our wanderings—that none of it would have come to be had I not put that first monster to sleep. Much respect and honor on its name, but freeing myself from its grip—yeah, that’s the ticket—loosed me into a vertiginous freedom. To think. To further sharpen my blade. I’ve left behind the humble dirt but will always revere its name, carry a little of it in a jar around on my neck. On to the throne. It is such a long and harrowing way.